Truth and Justice on Trial in Liberia

ON 8 JANUARY, ALMOST WITHOUT NOTICE ELSEWHERE, PUBLIC HEARINGS of Liberia's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) began at the Centennial Pavilion, a large mock-Roman structure flanked by the country's national museum and an imposing Baptist Church in downtown Monrovia. The TRC had been established by an Act of the Legislature in 2005, and prior to the public hearings had collected 16,000 statements from victims as well as alleged perpetrators of the country's nearly fifteen years of brutal civil war, 1989?2003. The timing of the hearings appeared propitious, for they coincided with the opening of the trial, for crimes against humanity and related offences, of Liberia's former President Charles Ghankay Taylor, several thousand miles away at the Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague. In contrast to the TRC hearings, the opening of the trial attracted significant international media coverage. It appeared that at long last accountability ? and ?closure? ? was being sought for the terrors and depredations of Liberia's recent past.|The only problem is that the trial focuses not on crimes Taylor committed in Liberia ? where before becoming president he was head of the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) rebels ? but on Taylor's alleged role in the war in neighbouring Sierra Leone. Meanwhile, in Liberia itself, the TRC process has been wobbly and controversial, and its many critics say that it will neither create ?a clear picture of the past? nor ?facilitate genuine healing and reconciliation? (its core mandate). What the TRC process has done beyond dispute, however, is neatly complement, at least to Liberians following the two processes, the prosecution's case against Taylor: the picture that has emerged of the former Liberian leader from the public hearings is roughly what the Special Court prosecutors have sketched ? that of a monster and warlord beyond politics, who not only caused untold suffering to his own people, but also, with criminal deliberation, sent his fighters to support the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and loot Sierra Leone. This picture is likely to endure, whatever the outcome of the Hague trial.